Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

38 I Ramnath
and fundament,lism. Furthermore, wherever the terminology
of anarchism appears in the Indian context, right-wing
clements frequently crop up as a menacing shadow not far
away. This does not mean that there is any inherent affinity
between anarchism and the reactionary Right, contrary to
the conflation sometimes made by sectors of the mainline
Indian Lett. What it does indicate is that certain situations
create common openings for both.
·OK same could be said in general of the worldwide
radical fermcnt in the fin de sieclc moment before World
'w'ar I-a moment of equal significance for the rise of anarchism
and the emergence of radical anticolonialism-when
multiple potentialities were held in combustible suspension.
Georges Sorel offers some clues here, in his writings
about revolutionary syndicalism during the same period,
when anticolonialists were meeting anarchists in Paris and
London. Sorel was a French civil servant born in 1842, an
engineer by training and a disciple of philosopher Henri­
Louis Bergson. He produced the bulk of his difficult-tocategorize
work on social theory in the last decade of the
nineteenth and first of the twentieth centmie", after his
professional retirement. As an advocate of Iabor syndicalism,
he abhorred bureaucracy and parliamentary armchair
socialism, favored total revolution over piecemeal reform,
and touted worker militance and direct action to seize control
of production. He also despised the state, particularly
in its bourgeois capitalist incarnation. Yet the premises of
his analysis were quite different from those of the socialist
branch of the Enlightenment project. Antirationalist and
antiliberal, his top imperative was seeking a workable, living